Extreme Slowdown (Office XP)

A few weeks ago, Outlook on my PC began to slow down enormously. It takes about 5 minutes to start up, menus take about 15 seconds to pop up, it takes a minute or so to open up any mail item, etc. I use Outlook connected to Exchange 2000 on a small LAN. No other PC's are affected. Task manager shows my CPU usage is close to 100% when I do anything in Outlook, so I assume it is a problem with Outlook, not Exchange. The PC runs Windows XP. I am up to date with all updates for both Windows and Microsoft Office.

Here are some things I have done, none of which have helped:
- Uninstalled all Outlook add-ins
- Repaired my Outlook installation using the "Detect and Repair" option on the Help menu
- Turning off messaging within Outlook (this was suggested in this forum).

Re: Extreme Slowdown (Office XP)

What size is your PST? If it is anything near 2Gb, you probably need to compact it and to do some archiving. Compacting is accessible by right-clicking on Personal Folders and choosing Properties|Advanced|Compact Now.